The questions to ask before you hire a bid writer

A review is £195 for a charity's funding application and £395 for a company's tender response, because a tender response is longer and scored question by question. A grant application written is £500 to £2,500, a tender response is from £500, a full tender is £1,950, and a month of applications is from £750 a month. Every fee is agreed in writing before anything starts, and the pricing page shows what moves a job inside its band.

Half, and the cost answer above sets out the rest. The read on whether to bid and the fixed fee both come before any of it, and both are free.

Not as a share of what you raise. On a grant application the fee for the work is agreed before we start, and there is one flat payment on an award above a set size, printed on the charity page. On a company tender you pick before any work starts. It is either the fixed payment in the table on that page or 5 per cent of the first-year value of the contract you win, capped at £15,000 and agreed in writing before anything begins. The company page sets both out.

A read of the guidance or the tender documents against what you do, and a straight answer on whether the bid is worth making. What it stops short of is written out on the pricing page.

Here a single application is a fixed fee from £500, and a retained month is £750 a month at the entry band for a set number of applications that fit you. Whatever else you are comparing it with, ask what the number covers and what happens when the work runs long.

A month. Either side can end it with a month's notice, and everything produced up to that point is yours.

There is no VAT to add to the published fees. Any applicable award payment is additional to the base fee. The quote you receive is the document to hold us to.

An hour to an hour and a half on a call, plus sending what you already hold: monitoring spreadsheets, last year's evaluation, accounts, the application that got turned down. After that the next thing you see is the finished draft with the open questions to decide.

Start with a review, which is the smallest thing to buy and is priced in the cost answer above. Give them the case study to check, and on miracles nobody controls the funder's decision and nobody here claims to.

You hear back within 24 hours. A review comes back within 3 working days from the day the tender documents land.

Yes. On a retainer it is part of every month's work. On a one-off piece, if you're bidding into the wrong fund or the wrong contract, that comes back before any fee is agreed.

Yes, tenders for contracts and commissioned services are on the same fee bands, and the company page walks through them. Community interest companies and social enterprises can use whichever of the two fits the money they are going after.

Mostly the name. A tender is the formal, scored kind of bid a public body or a large buyer runs. The writing is the same job: answers built from your delivery record against the criteria and the weightings, which are the shares of the marks each question carries.

You send the tender documents or the guidance with the deadline, and your last two or three similar pieces of work with what you delivered. If it's a tender, your policies and certificates list too. Then an hour to an hour and a half on a call.

The written answers, the method statements, which set out how you would deliver each requirement, the social value section, which is what your delivery does for the local area, and the narrative, yes. Insurance certificates, policies, accounts and anything needing a signature are yours to supply, and you get the list at the start with the dates the tender sets.

If the guidance is short and you've written a winning one to this funder before, you probably should, and sending it here to be told that is free. A review is what to buy when the money matters and you want the budget checked before the funder does. Buy the writing when there is no spare week on the team.

Every fact in it is something you can produce if asked, you decide the open questions, and you send it in as yours. Ask us for the source of any line and you get back the file it came from.

No writer decides the award. What is decided here is that every figure adds up, every answer sits under the criterion it is marked on, and nothing true about you is left off the form. The weak points are named to you before the funder finds them, and the fee for the work is agreed in writing before it starts.

Not a win, no. On most tenders price carries part of the score, so what the answers can do is take every mark that is left. The prices you are quoting are totalled again, and every requirement the buyer set is checked before the tender closes.

Tell us, and one round of the changes you pick is made for you inside the fee, and anything wanted after that is quoted first. The scope is written down before we start, so there's a document to check it against.

Your portal logins stay with you and every message to a funder goes out from your own people, so you read the finished bid and submit it yourselves.

If the buyer brings it forward, you get a straight list of what can still be done, and you decide. If it's pushed back, nothing changes and the fee stays where it is.

We keep the number of live bids small so every client can see their own work moving. If a month is full when you enquire you are told in the same reply, with the date one opens.

Yes. How AI tools are used, who answers for the words, and what a funder's AI-use statement gets are all on the security page.

Your material is used for your bid only. We don't train anything on it or reuse your evidence in another organisation's bid, and working copies are deleted on request. The detail is in the privacy notice, and if your funder or your board needs a data handling agreement, ask and you get one.

You do, on delivery, and that includes the research as well as the drafts.